Extraordinary Pakistanis: Find My Adventure

Have you ever thought of quitting your cosy 9 to 5 job and making a living off your passion? Does the fear of the unknown stop you from taking the leap? Does the stability of a monthly pay check imprison your dreams instead of letting them free? This is a story about a young adventurer, Komail Abbas Naqvi, 24, who’s taken the gamble of a lifetime by quitting his banking job at a prominent international bank. Throwing away a safe but lucrative career path for scaling mountains isn’t every LUMS graduate’s cup of tea but there are many lessons for other young entrepreneurs in his journey.

“I started senior year very relaxed,” Komail writes, in a post on LUMS Graduate Diaries. “I had been announced the President of the LUMS Adventure Society — LAS, I had successfully executed my very first trip for my own travel venture after rejecting a pretty solid corporate internship offer. I had returned from a summer expedition of Minglik Sar with not a care in the world. But soon afterwards, I found myself getting bogged down by the same worries that clouded every senior’s mind: what will my post-graduation life look like? Will it be a corporate job? Non-corporate? Entrepreneurial venture? Masters? I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I found myself on the same bandwagon as everyone else, applying for jobs that I knew I wasn’t really interested in, just to fill in the ‘job’ checkbox. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I managed to land a job in Standard Chartered Bank long before graduation.”

“My family was thrilled. My friends were thrilled. Everyone around me was ecstatic that I was one of the first people from the batch to get employed. But I wasn’t,” shares Komail. “I never saw myself as a 9-5 desk job kind of guy. But when everyone around you is waving job acceptances, your vision tends to get blurred.”

“The idea of a stable job and paycheque (almost) kept me from pursuing my dream,” Komail shares, with the subtle confidence of a self-made man in the making. “I wanted to revolutionise the tourism industry in Pakistan. But after graduation, I joined Standard Chartered Bank as a Fast Track Graduate. While it was great to be a part of a great bank and a great team, I always felt like something was missing. I was not meant to sit at a desk. I always felt that I was meant for something greater. So alongside SCB, I started working on something greater. I started working on my own venture, which was bigger and better than anything I had ever pursued. Many tireless days and overworked weekends later, I was able to launch Find My Adventure, which was what I was meant to do. Find My Adventure is my very own brainchild. It is the first of its kind travel portal in Pakistan, and is growing and expanding every day.”

“In 3 to 5 years, I want to see Find My Adventure as the go-to platform for any travel advice people need in Pakistan,” says Komail. When the platform was launched, Komail and his co-founders were overwhelmed by the response. “In the first 48 hours, we had over 250 requests,” he shares. “We wanted to stand out for quality service so we called every customer individually. We were working 18 hour days, doing our day jobs in the morning and working in the evenings. Within the first 20 days, I realised that we were so busy trying to manage the day-to-day business volume that we didn’t have any room to think strategically and grow. That’s when I thought about quitting my job and coming on full time. Since I had the lowest salary amongst all the partners, it made sense for me to quit. But convincing my parents was a difficult task.”

“Even my brother, who is a partner in the business was torn with his advice,” shares Komail. “My brother told me that as a partner, I know we need someone to come in full time but as a brother I won’t say anything. He didn’t want me to regret this decision if things didn’t work out. I was on the cusp of quitting my job at the time and this was confusing advice. I took the leap anyways.” It’s still early days but we’ll be watching Komail’s bold new adventure closely. Here’s to hoping that Pakistan’s tourism industry will scale new heights with changemakers like Komail.

Extraordinary Pakistanis seeks to find and share inspirational stories about everyday Pakistani heroes (if you know someone who should be profiled, send us a tweet @Mbilallakhani). If we don’t share these stories about Pakistan, no one else will.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2016.

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